Technology tantrums

Richard Butt
11/ 1/2008

WHOEVER said new technology was meant to make life simpler was talking out of their botty.

I was thinking about it when my grandmother got a new telly recently. It was set up for her, but when she was left alone she couldn’t fathom out how to get it to work.

Back in the mists of time, just after we crawled out of a primeval swamp and television was new, all you had to do was plug the set in, wait for it to warm up (this took a while – it gave you a chance to evolve, swapping gills for lungs) and watch it. There was only the BBC. But once you’d got the aerial set up, you were away.

Then in the 1950s, along came independent television. For this, most people needed another aerial. So another layer of complication was added. But once installed, you switched between channel 12 for the BBC and 9 for ITV.

Anyone under 50 probably doesn’t remember this. I shouldn’t. But I was deprived as a child. Today social services would be called in.

My parents didn’t see the need for a new-fangled set capable of picking up 625-line UHF signals and thus, BBC2, which, of course, necessitated yet another aerial and another technology-induced layer of complication.

For me, this principally meant missing out on Play Away on Saturday afternoons. How BBC1 continuity announcers taunted me with their descriptions of impossibly exotic celebrities, such as Brian Cant and Toni Arthur, on a channel we couldn’t get.

For me, the only options available were Frank Bough and Dickie Davies trotting out endless Saturday afternoon sport. Everyone else on the street was getting a colour television set. Not us. My dad said we could have a colour telly. He took it literally. He painted the cabinet a dusky pink. Oh, how we didn’t laugh.

When we got our Betamax video recorder, things got more complicated still. By then, we’d got a colour telly. VHF (405-line television) stopped in 1985. But then we had to tune a button into the video and tune all the channels (there were four then) separately into the video’s tuner. Already adults were incapable of getting their heads around it. They had to collar a passing six-year-old to do the work.

The next technological development was satellite television. So you have to stick up a dish (or a squarial if you were really unlucky and subscribed to the soon-to-die BSB service), tune all that in and get it to work. Everything since then – like Freeview and cable television – has added so many wires and so many bits of brain-sapping hardware that a lot of us need it to be installed professionally.

It doesn’t add up to an easy life.

My grandmother turned out to be using the wrong remote control. She couldn’t understand why a new television had the same “doofer” as the last one. In fact, the “doofer” worked her Sky (favourite channel 203 – Channel M – of course) and she gets all her telly from satellite. But it befuddled her, and she’s not dim.

By the time of the next general election, most of the nation should no longer receive analogue signals.

My grandmother has already gone digital. But many old folk haven’t. Imagine the fury of a pensioner without Countdown.

Since the elderly are more likely to vote than everybody else, that could make life much more complicated for politicians.

Richard Butt edits Channel M’s early evening news – every weeknight from 5pm